Tuesday, April 15, 2008

Mergerpalooza

News has hit the wire that Delta has become assimilated by Northwest Airlines as part of a $17 billion merger deal, creating the largest airline in the country. Anxious locals can now breath a sigh of relief knowing now that our hub won't disappear only to leave us trapped in Zion forever.

However, the larger implications ought to be troubling. In the last eight years of the dubya regime the pro-business, anti-regulation environment has spawned its own fair share of catastrophic blunders, from Crandall canyon to the head of FEMA being a former pony judge during one of our country's worst ever natural disasters. But the one which we might not really feel until well after Bush has left is how the environment for airline monopolies will affect flights' services and costs.

Certainly no one in Utah is upset that we've not lost Delta, but the flipside to keeping the hub with the ensuing Delta/Northwest merge, looks as if it might now be setting off a mergers domino effect. According to this article, Continental and United are now looking into a merger in order to compete against the new Delta/Northwest juggernaut.

Air line consolidation now seems to be a matter of survival during our times' current economic troubles, and this administration certainly won't object to such monopolies appearing, especially given the circumstances. It's just a wonder how fewer independents and more combines will affect your flight quality to come... I predict turbulence (Eric S. Peterson).

3 comments:

Wrong! I hate Delta and wholeheartedly wish that they had gone under. Delta sucks. Their employees are rude and their level of service is total shit. If I had any choice in which carrier to use here in SLC, I'd avoid Delta like a rotting carcass.

I'm sick of people speaking about Delta as if it were the only airline in the world that would like to hub in SLC. If Delta left, they'd easily be replaced by another airline.

It's plain that this merger is bad news. Just how many flights are now controlled by many major carriers? Most of the flights, by very few. Bad news.

Who the hell said anything about ma and pa airlines? The pricing issue is barely scratching the surface of this merger. And, as a standard, that'd be 30K feet, not 20K.

You can have all the uniformity you like with Delta, and you're welcome to it. Delta uniformly over charges for tickets, uniformly provides crap service, uniformly loses my luggage, uniformly charges for meals that are shoddy at best and used to be included with the ticket, uniformly hires rude bitches to work the isles as flight attendants(no, not all of them, but a good portion), uniformly charges $5 for a beer, uniformly flies cramped, outdated planes, uniformly offers you a choice of peanuts or cheese-filled crackers but not both (that'd just cost too much), and uniformly sucks all around.

And now, they're even bigger, with more power, political clout and far less competition, meaning, you can uniformly expect them to suck even worse in the future.

Go get yourself a flight on Emirates, China Airlines, British Airways, Lufthansa or even Korea Air. You'll see just how good flying can be for the same amount of money and you'll never want to fly Delta again.